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Who’s driving electric?

April 3, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Electric cars are growing in popularity around the world and are expected to represent 20% of new car sales this year. In some places, they have a much bigger share: 38% in China and a whopping 82% in Norway. Here in the U.S., things are more complicated.

Last year, EVs represented 8.5% of U.S. new car sales while hybrids accounted for an additional 10%. But enthusiasm for plug-in vehicles was by no means universal or consistent across the country or across various segments of the population.

Overall, the West Coast, and especially California, dominated the electric vehicle market. Electric vehicles accounted for more than 30% of new car sales in the San Francisco Bay Area. In Los Angeles, the number was close to 25%.

A number of metro areas elsewhere also had strong EV sales, including Denver, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Austin, and Phoenix. New York City had almost 10% EV registrations.

Americans buying electric cars so far tend to be richer, younger, and more likely to live in urban areas than the average person and are often motivated by environmental concerns. Meanwhile, about half of American adults say they are not likely to consider purchasing an EV as their next car and that figure rises to 70% for Republicans.

Lack of interest in EVs is often based on concerns about the availability of sufficient charging options or high EV prices, although those are dropping. There is also concern about EV efficiency in colder climates, although the Norwegians clearly don’t find it to be a problem.

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Electric Vehicles

Photo, posted October 18, 2021, courtesy of Chris Yarzab via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Fuel From Wind And Water | Earth Wise

February 21, 2023 By EarthWise 1 Comment

Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and it can be used as a fuel to run cars, trains, and even airplanes. Using it produces no harmful emissions. However, to date, the way it is economically produced is not clean and green. It is made from natural gas and leaves behind lots of carbon dioxide.

Around the world there are many projects working on so-called green hydrogen. Producing hydrogen by splitting water into its component elements is called electrolysis and produces only oxygen as a waste product. The problem with electrolysis is that it takes prodigious amounts of energy and therefore is very expensive.

A new project taking place in north Texas hopes to create the country’s first large-scale producer of green hydrogen. The project is building a 900-megawatt wind farm along with a 500-megawatt solar farm. The 1.4 gigawatts of total production capacity is more energy than the city of Austin consumes. That energy will be used to produce 200,000 kilograms of hydrogen a day.

This project is among the largest proposed green hydrogen projects in the U.S. There are green hydrogen proposals in Europe, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East that range from 10 GW to 67 GW.

The Texas project, being developed in partnership by Air Products and AES, has been enabled by government support from the Inflation Reduction Act.

There are a few thousand hydrogen-powered cars, boats, and trains but without substantial, cost-effective hydrogen infrastructure, the market is very limited. Subsidizing the development of the necessary infrastructure is essential if there is any real chance to create the long-imagined hydrogen economy.

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Texas Project Will Use Wind to Make Fuel Out of Water

Photo, posted June 5, 2005, courtesy of City Transport Info via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Understanding How To Enhance Desalination | Earth Wise

February 16, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Desalination is the process of removing mineral components – notably salt – from saline water, generally seawater. Over 16,000 desalination plants operate across 177 countries, generating 25 billion gallons of fresh water each year. Currently, desalination accounts for about 1% of the world’s drinking water.

The leading process for desalination in terms of installed capacity as well as new installations is reverse osmosis that makes use of a thin-film composite membrane based on ultra-thin polyamide.

Despite the fact that these membranes are widely used for desalination, they are actually rather poorly understood. It has not been known exactly how water moves through them. As a result, much of the progress made on the technology over the decades has been essentially based on guesswork.

A team of researchers at the University of Texas, Austin has used advanced microscopy techniques to solve some of the mysteries of reverse osmosis membranes. By mapping membranes at very high resolution – less than half the diameter of a DNA strand – they gained a much better understanding of what makes a membrane better at reverse osmosis.

They found that desalination membranes are inconsistent in mass distribution and density and that these inconsistencies can impair membrane performance. It turns out that inconsistencies and dead zones in membranes play a bigger role than membrane thickness. By making the membranes more uniform in density at the nanoscale, they were able to increase desalination efficiency 30 to 40 percent, therefore cleaning more water with less energy and at lower cost.

Producing fresh water is not just essential for public health, it is also crucial for use in agriculture and energy production.

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Nanoscale control of internal inhomogeneity enhances water transport in desalination membranes

Photo, posted February 13, 2017, courtesy of Jacob Vanderheyden via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.